Building an Engineering & Security News Aggregator (10 Sources, No APIs)

We built a curated engineering and security news aggregator that pulls from 10 high-signal sources, deduplicates content, and updates every 6 hours. No paid APIs. No scraping. No login. Just clean, structured news for developers. This post breaks down exactly how it works. What This Is A lightweight news wire combining: Hacker News Lobsters InfoQ Cloudflare Blog Krebs on Security The Hacker News (Security) NIST NVD (vulnerabilities) GitHub Blog OpenAI Blog Anthropic Research The goal: high-quality signal, zero noise, zero cost. Why Build This? Most engineering/news aggregators fail in one of these ways: Too noisy (no curation) Too expensive (paid APIs) Too slow (manual updates) Too fragmented (you check 10 sites anyway) We wanted: A single feed Fresh updates (but not real-time obsession) No operational cost No lock-in (no accounts, no tracking) Stack Hono (API layer) Drizzle ORM Postgres Next.js (frontend) RSS feeds + Hacker News Firebase API High-Level Architecture ┌───────────────┐ │